An enterprise network is a large customer network including a vast array of networking equipment (often geographically dispersed) requiring the ability to communicate and share information. An enterprise customer (such as Intel, IBM, and the like) typically subscribes to specific service plans such that each time a user comes online in the enterprise customer network, the user is provisioned to have access to services in service plans to which the enterprise customer subscribes. The services provided in the service plans may include three-digit dialing, four-digit dialing, five-digit dialing, star-nine dialing (i.e., dialing “*9” for international), call waiting, call forwarding, teleconferencing capabilities, voicemail, and a wide variety of other services and dialing plans offered by most service providers.
Since enterprise customers typically have different telecommunication services and application needs, the services and dialing plans subscribed to by an enterprise customer are typically particular to that enterprise customer, and often vary across enterprise customers. As such, a service provider supporting a plurality of enterprise customers typically hosts a large embedded base of public and private dialing plans. The service plans and associated dialing plans of an enterprise customer are private and cannot currently be accessed across distinct enterprise customer networks.
A service provider typically packages particular services, dialing plans, and other features into service offerings that span a wide variety of services that may be required by an enterprise customer (such as time division multiplexing (TDM) services, Internet Protocol (IP) services, international services, and the like). As such, specific dialing plans are often embedded within a particular service offering in order to enable the enterprise customer users to use the services provided in the particular service offering. In general, a dialing plan provides specialized routing associated with specialized services to which an enterprise customer subscribes.
Unfortunately, the embedding of specific dialing plans within service offerings requires that an enterprise customer subscribe to a full service offering in order to obtain one particular dialing plan. For example, if a US-based enterprise customer requires a four-digit dialing plan, but the service provider has included the four-digit dialing plan within an international service offering, the US-based enterprise customer must subscribe to the entire international service offering in order to utilize the four-digit-dialing dialing plan. As a result, network endpoints are often unable to utilize particular dialing plans.
Furthermore, in the case of multiple distinct enterprise customers, when a user of one enterprise customer network establishes a connection with a user of another enterprise customer network using an IP network, that connection is transferred to and carried over a public switched telephone network (PSTN). This is even the case for a situation in which both enterprise customer networks are using a common IP network. In other words, since each enterprise customer network is treated as a private network with respect to other enterprise customer networks, in order to complete a call between enterprise customer networks the call must be transferred through another intermediate network (e.g., a PSTN). This further exacerbates the capability of network endpoints to initiate call requests across enterprise customer networks using dialing plans.
As such, a need exists in the art for a method of processing call requests from a first enterprise customer network to a second enterprise customer network, such that network endpoints within one enterprise customer network have the ability to initiate call requests to network endpoints within a different enterprise customer network.